The Man Who Invented the Daleks (24 page)

These changes aside, and even allowing for the fact that the stories were all new, the television Baron was still in the mould of the 1930s heroes. He is absurdly well-connected, ‘one of only three men in this country who have immediate and unquestioned access to the security vaults of the Bank of England’, and he acts on occasion as an informal agent for a government organisation known as Diplomatic Intelligence, answering to a crusty English gentleman, Templeton-Green (Colin Gordon). He also retains an instinctive sympathy for the underdog, however much he protests that his only interest is financial reward. In ‘Red Horse, Red Rider’ he finds himself trying to wrestle a statuette of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the clutches of a military dictatorship in the Balkans, in order to sell it to provide funds for the resistance. As he rides the railroads, pursued by the secret police, his companion, a beautiful young rebel named Savannah (Jane Merrow), wonders why Mannering is here at all: ‘I don’t understand you. What are you doing riding in this box-car across this godforsaken country of mine? You own three of the most exclusive antique shops in the world, you are a charter member of the jet set, you have beautiful women. Why are you doing this?’ ‘Money,’ he replies unconvincingly. ‘I’ll make a hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the Horsemen. If I have to dodge a few bullets along the way, it’s all part of the game.’ ‘Is there no other reason?’ she insists, and his reply comes as much from the twinkling of his eyes as it does from his shrugged ‘Maybe.’

Solidarity with the oppressed is a running theme. Several of the episodes written or co-written by Nation for
The Baron
are relatively straightforward jewel heists, ranging from standard tales of released prisoners going back to dig up their treasure hoards, all the way up to an attempt on the Crown Jewels in the double episode ‘Masquerade’/‘The Killing’. But there is elsewhere a strong vein of broad-brush politics. In ‘A Memory of Evil’ the Baron battles an Austrian neo-Nazi group called the New Front, while in ‘Night of the Hunter’ he is back in the Balkans confronting another military dictatorship, this one presided over by a general so evil that he wears sunglasses after dark and a uniform that includes matching brown leather boots and gloves. His manners are little better than those of the French thieves in ‘Jeannine’, for he puts his cigar out in the milk jug, and when Mannering suggests that it’s not a good thing to destroy a democratic regime in a military coup, he behaves as a thriller villain should, laughing at such foolishness: ‘Democracy! Hah! It’s merely an archaic word, not a political creed.’ Again Mannering is bringing in money for the anti-government rebels.

‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ featured another familiar figure from the thriller library, with the mad scientist Ingar Sorenson (Kay Walsh). In a nod towards Nation’s later series,
Survivors
, she has developed an extremely contagious virus that kills anyone exposed to it, which she is offering to anyone in search of a biological weapon and who can meet the asking price. Voicing one of Nation’s recurrent themes, she explains her abandonment of the high principles of science. ‘A long time ago, I decided to market my work, and leave morality to the buyer,’ she says, arguing that this is the way of the modern world. ‘The defence budget of any world power could finance enough research to rid us of all our ills. But ask any government to believe that drugs are more important than rockets …’ Inevitably she kills herself accidentally with the last of her deadly bacteria, and the final portentous word is left for Mannering: ‘It’s all over. Until somebody comes up with the same thing again. Or something worse.’

In the best plotline of the series, the double episode ‘Storm Warning’/‘The Island’ sees the Chinese government funding a plan to bring down America’s latest space rocket. By hacking into the rocket’s communication system, it is intended to change its re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere so that it splashes down 1,500 miles off course, where a ship is waiting to fish it out of the ocean, hauling in the most advanced technology in the world. It’s a fiendish plan worthy of feature-film treatment (though perhaps a little too reminiscent of the James Bond movie
Dr No
) and the production mostly does it justice. Much of the action is set on board the waiting ship, on to which Mannering has smuggled himself in yet another attempt to rescue Cordelia. For she was not one of the more resourceful heroines of the ITC stable; captured by villains on an almost weekly basis and never allowed to do any fighting, she did display a cool, slightly ironic tone in counterpoint to Mannering’s rugged openness, but Sue Lloyd struggled to make a great deal of the role. ‘I had to make her more Lucille Ball,’ she commented later, ‘because of being ridiculously weak at the last moment.’ Mannering suffered from no such shortcomings; as adept with a sub-machine gun as with his fists, he was the action hero as all-American jock.

Unlike
The Saint
, the atmosphere of
The Baron
was a little to one side of the carefree, wisecracking, bachelor romp through Swinging Britain. The jaunty theme tune was there, as was the jet-set lifestyle, but this was a hero who didn’t go in for womanising and who lacked the jovial repartee that had been de rigueur in British thrillers ever since Bulldog Drummond. In the absence of the self-mocking humour that Moore brought to
The Saint
,
The Baron
was a much more serious proposition. The shows had no straight-to-camera introduction and tended to end abruptly at the denouement, without an epilogue or additional explanation; there was no easing in and out of the tale, just an action-packed adventure.

And on occasion those adventures could be very dark. The last episode of the series, ‘Countdown’, featured a fine array of evocative settings – a scrap yard, railway sidings, a film set, a crypt and a windmill – as the backdrops to five unpleasant deaths, including a man kicked out of a railway compartment in front of an oncoming train, another impaled on an antique sword, and a third being tortured with a lit cigarette before being crushed under a concrete block. If this had been
The Avengers
, the killings would have been depicted as witty self-parodies of the action genre; here they are treated seriously, looking forward to the violent British gangster films (
Performance, Get Carter, Villain
) that were to come. The same episode also included a guest appearance by Edward Woodward as a rival antique dealer, Arkin Morley, who walks on the shady side of the street and has a nice line in arrogance; asked how good his Latin is, he replies, ‘I speak it and read it with a fluency which can only come from a very superior English education.’ (Leslie Charteris, who went to Rossall School, was also fond of sideways attacks on the public school system.)

Much of this undercurrent of unease was attributable to the influence of Nation, who was creatively – though not personally – inclined to pessimism. It is notable that one of the few times that
The Baron
broke the ITC convention on using American currency is in the episode ‘The Man Outside’, in which an Italian-American gangster named Bruno Orsini (David Bauer) attempts to bring six million pounds in forged notes into the country. Orsini explains to Mannering that he’s motivated not merely by greed but by a desire for revenge, having previously been deported from Britain. ‘You know what this much fake money could do to a country’s economy, Mannering? Smash it! It could make the pound worthless,’ he rants. ‘I’m going to see this whole stinking country go bankrupt. I’m going to push in millions more notes, give them away if I have to. By the time I’m finished, the pound’ll be just so much coloured paper.’ The episode was, in a quiet way, Nation’s comment on the vulnerability of the British economy to international speculation, and was broadcast in April 1967, in the midst of a continuing currency crisis that would, later in the year, force the Labour government to devalue sterling.

Nation’s influence can also be seen in the resourcefulness of the Baron, his ability to improvise his way out of tricky situations. It was a trait common to many of Nation’s heroes, and he evidently stockpiled any ideas he came across for later use in his scripts. Ted Ray, with whom he worked so closely at the end of the 1950s, used to tell an anecdote about an alcoholic music hall comedian of his acquaintance who sometimes ran out of people from whom to scrounge a drink. ‘If nothing else, he was resourceful. Once he went into the Gents, removed the light bulb from its socket, inserted a halfpenny, and replaced the bulb. The first person to switch on the light produced a short circuit and plunged the whole house into darkness. It was the easiest thing for Cyril to grope a bit and gobble up someone else’s pint.’ When, in ‘Storm Warning’, Steve Mannering finds himself locked in the cold room used for storing meat on the ship, he employs precisely the same trick, enabling him to slip quietly out when a crewman comes to investigate the power cut.

With the pressure of writing so many original stories himself while at the same time fulfilling his duties as script editor, Nation also dipped into his previous work for inspiration. Ingar Sorenson in ‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ is not exactly the first fictional scientist to discover the ultimate secret weapon, but it was perhaps careless of Nation to give her a name quite so redolent of Professor Soren in ‘The Inescapable Word’ (one of his scripts for
The Saint
), who has developed an equally deadly weapon: ‘It destroys all life, but leaves no trace of radiation. The classic death ray.’ Soren too is killed by his own invention. Similarly, both ‘The Crime of the Century’ in
The Saint
and ‘Epitaph for a Hero’ in
The Baron
feature robberies that require the pumping of poison gas through a ventilation system to put armed guards out of action.

But such minor borrowings were as nothing compared to the pure self-plagiarism of ‘Portrait of Louisa’ in
The Baron
, which not only lifted wholesale the plot of ‘Lida’ in
The Saint
, but also recycled large chunks of dialogue. Nation wrote both scripts, adapting ‘Lida’ from a Charteris story, and, although he added several layers of complication to the tale (and took the trouble to relocate it from the Miami of Charteris’s original to the Bahamas and then, in ‘Portrait of Louisa’, to England), he was perhaps fortunate that he didn’t run into trouble with the Saint’s creator. As so often in Nation’s career, there were precedents for this practice to be found among the writers of his youth. Edwy Searles Brooks, for example, one of the most prolific of those writers – he produced an estimated 36 million words in his career – was, like Nation, not averse to turning his hand to self-plagiarism: many of his 1940s novels about the character Norman Conquest were literal rewrites of his own earlier work, when the central figure had been Waldo the Wonder Man.

On this occasion, however, Nation’s sleight of hand did not go unnoticed. In an ill-timed piece of scheduling, both ‘Lida’ and ‘Portrait of Louisa’ were shown on the same weekend in America, and the comparisons were hard to avoid. ‘It was an embarrassment for Terry,’ shrugged Johnny Goodman, the production supervisor on both shows, ‘but I suppose there are a limited number of stories in the world.’

‘I
was, for that short time, the most famous writer on television.’ Terry Nation’s assessment of his position as 1965 dawned was perfectly accurate. He was being invited to appear on the prestigious BBC2 discussion show,
Late Night Line-Up
, he was the subject of admiring profiles in serious newspapers, his stories were appearing on an almost fortnightly basis on
The Saint
and he was still the ‘Dalek-man’, recipient of sacks full of fan mail. Dalekmania showed no sign of abating, and he formed a company, Dalek Productions (the other directors were Kate Nation and Beryl Vertue), to deal with the continuing expansion: this year the monsters were to be seen again on television and in books, and were to make their debut in comics, on record, on stage and in the movies. The conquest of Britain was virtually complete, but for someone of Nation’s generation, raised on fantasies of Hollywood and on comic books from GIs, there remained the ultimate allure of America.

The image of America dominated British culture in the post-war years. That it was possible for British creativity to make it big in the States had been demonstrated by a handful of success stories, including those of Leslie Charteris, Alfred Hitchcock, David Niven and Dylan Thomas, but these had been isolated cases, and Tony Hancock was just one of many who had tried and failed. Meanwhile Britain’s evolving relationship with its former colony was captured by artists like Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi, the early practitioners of pop art: a fascination with the movies, magazines and mass culture that came across the Atlantic, a craving for jazz, both ancient and modern, an infatuation with the cult of stardom that worshipped ready-made icons in Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Popeye. There was sometimes a note of detached irony in pop art, but that was mostly overridden by an unmistakable sense of celebration, a revelling in the industrial production of entertainment. At a time when much of the left was loftily dismissing American imports as ‘culture poured out over a defenceless people by the millionaires’, pop artists as well as early British rock and roll stars were embracing precisely the same material. And crucial to all of it was that this was culture consumed at one remove from the real thing, for few had ever experienced America at first hand.

At the turn of the 1960s this began to change, as the isolated successes began to mount up into something resembling a trend. A number of photographers (David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy) began to make names for themselves in the fashion industry. The new wave of British cinema was exporting successfully, with Oscar nominations for Laurence Harvey in
Room at the Top
(1959) and Laurence Olivier in
The Entertainer
(1960), while Peter Sellers made a successful move to Hollywood. In New York satirists from
Beyond the Fringe
and from Peter Cook’s Establishment Club both enjoyed successful theatre runs in 1962, as did Harold Pinter’s play
The Caretaker
and Anthony Newley’s musical
Stop the World – I Want to Get Off
, swiftly followed by Lionel Bart’s
Oliver!.
All were unmistakably British works, and critics began to talk about the ‘British domination of Broadway’. There was also James Bond; already a hit in America via the novels of Ian Fleming (Bond was said to be John F. Kennedy’s ‘favourite fictional hero’), he broke through to a mass audience when the film of
Dr No
was released in 1963, a year later than in Britain.